Hunt for the Masked Booby Goes Digital

By

John Pancake

April 10, 2012

The Loggerhead Shrike, known as the "butcher bird" because it may impale its prey on thorns, eludes many Shenandoah Valley birders.

But with a smartphone and one of several clever new birding apps, a birder in the gently rolling fields would learn that shrikes had been sighted west of Staunton, Va., last month. Another tap would provide a map to the lane near Buffalo Gap in the Allegheny Mountains where a sighting was last reported. Depending on the app, a birder could also see an image of the shrike, learn about its habitat or even try to attract it by playing its harsh song.

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The Loggerhead Shrike
AnimalsAnimals

Birding apps, listservs and websites have revolutionized a once-simple hobby for the nation's estimated 50 million bird-watchers. The digital tools are a boon for hard-core birders but a mixed blessing for birds. Augusta County farm owner Michael Godfrey says so many shrike-seekers have been showing up that they may have chased the birds into the next county.

The hub of the revolution in North America is eBird, a website at Cornell University's nonprofit Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which has evolved over 10 years into a kind of Facebook for birders. Christopher Wood, an eBird project leader, says it gets 100,000 unique visitors a month. Its pivotal feature is a searchable site where ornithologists and amateurs can enter lists of birds—whether the 30 species spotted Thursday in Central Park or the "life list" of every species someone has ever identified—as well as access others' lists. Friends can share lists, so you can track what your buddy, Wayne, saw in the hills above Sarajevo yesterday. You can also set up a wish list, and if you keep checking you'll find out right away when somebody nearby reports a rare sighting of, say, the Masked Booby.

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Christopher Wood and Jessie Barry, project leaders at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology at Cornell University, try to get in an hour of birding a day.
Carrie Niland for The Wall Street Journal

With so many users, eBird also is used by scientists. Last year, a study by wildlife agencies, conservation groups and scientists used eBird data to document the importance of public lands in bird conservation.

A recent addition, "BirdCast," combines meteorological and ornithological data to forecast migratory surges, such as when the surf will be alive with sandpipers or the sky teeming with hawks. Cornell ornithologists hope this fall to have an interactive feature called "Merlin," which makes use of crowd-sourcing to help a user, step by step, identify that brown flit on the bird feeder, says Jessie Barry, another eBird project leader (and Mr. Wood's fiancée).

As field guides move onto smartphones, birding may change even more, especially with the use of smartphone audio features for "digital playback" of bird songs in the field. Digital playback can attract jewel-like warblers from the high leafy canopy. Males hear the song, sense a rival and rush to investigate. Some people object to the practice because it agitates birds, if only for a short time. National parks and wildlife refuges ban it. While neither the National Audubon Society nor the American Birding Association opposes it, both warn against overuse.

Opinion among experienced birders is divided. Sheri Williamson, director of the Southeastern Arizona Bird Observatory, says playback violates her sense of "fair chase." It's almost like hunters who shoot birds over a baited field, she suggests.

Wes Biggs, a guide at Florida Nature Tours, says used with a little common sense, digital playback is pretty harmless. He says, "99.9% of the time, playing tapes does absolutely nothing. Zero. Nothing. If anything, it might give the bird a little extra exercise it wouldn't have gotten otherwise."

"It's sort of like saying: Is drinking wine good or bad?" says Cornell's Mr. Wood. "If you share a bottle with your wife in the evening, it could do good things. But there may be a downside if overdone."

Birders hear more than they see, but songs can be hard to identify. If there's a killer birding app on the horizon, it may be one that identifies a species based on the song. University of Wisconsin ornithologist Mark Berres is applying for a patent for an app he calls WeBird, which could be available next year. You'd record a snatch of bird song on your iPhone and use the app to compare the snippet with thousands of recordings in a database.

Dr. Berres says a grad student came to his office in 2010 and used his iPhone Shazam app to identify Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb," which was playing. "It was like, Whoa!…We could use this for birds!" Dr. Berres exclaimed.

A Bird in the Phone ...

Smartphone apps give birders a digital edge. Most iPhone apps can be used on iPods and iPads. Most prices below are based on iTunes this week.

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